We provide the supplements of "Contextual Gaussian Process Bandits with Neural Networks" here. Specifically, we discuss alternative acquisition functions that can be incorporated with the neural network-accompanied Gaussian process (NN-AGP) model in Section 6. In Section 7, we discuss the bandit algorithm with NN-AGP, where the neural network approximation error is considered. In Section 8, we provide the detailed proof of theorems. We provide the experimental details and include additional numerical experiments in Section 9. Last we discuss the limitations of NN-AGP and propose the potential approaches to addressing the limitations for future work, including sparse NN-AGP for alleviating computational burdens and transfer learning with NN-AGP to address cold-start issue; see Section 10. In the main text, we employ the upper confidence bound function as the acquisition function in the contextual Bayesian optimization approach. Here, we provide two alternative choices: Thompson sampling (TS) and knowledge gradient (KG). We describe the two procedures of the contextual GP bandit problems with NN-AGP, where the acquisition function is replaced by TS or KG. It chooses the action that maximizes the expected reward with respect to a random belief that is drawn for a posterior distribution.

This study enhances Jiang et al.'s compression-based classification algorithm by addressing its limitations in detecting semantic similarities between text documents. The proposed improvements focus on unigram extraction and optimized concatenation, eliminating reliance on entire document compression. By compressing extracted unigrams, the algorithm mitigates sliding window limitations inherent to gzip, improving compression efficiency and similarity detection. The optimized concatenation strategy replaces direct concatenation with the union of unigrams, reducing redundancy and enhancing the accuracy of Normalized Compression Distance (NCD) calculations. Experimental results across datasets of varying sizes and complexities demonstrate an average accuracy improvement of 5.73%, with gains of up to 11% on datasets containing longer documents. Notably, these improvements are more pronounced in datasets with high-label diversity and complex text structures. The methodology achieves these results while maintaining computational efficiency, making it suitable for resource-constrained environments. This study provides a robust, scalable solution for text classification, emphasizing lightweight preprocessing techniques to achieve efficient compression, which in turn enables more accurate classification.

We provide the supplements of "Contextual Gaussian Process Bandits with Neural Networks" here. Specifically, we discuss alternative acquisition functions that can be incorporated with the neural network-accompanied Gaussian process (NN-AGP) model in Section 6. In Section 7, we discuss the bandit algorithm with NN-AGP, where the neural network approximation error is considered. In Section 8, we provide the detailed proof of theorems. We provide the experimental details and include additional numerical experiments in Section 9. Last we discuss the limitations of NN-AGP and propose the potential approaches to addressing the limitations for future work, including sparse NN-AGP for alleviating computational burdens and transfer learning with NN-AGP to address cold-start issue; see Section 10. In the main text, we employ the upper confidence bound function as the acquisition function in the contextual Bayesian optimization approach. Here, we provide two alternative choices: Thompson sampling (TS) and knowledge gradient (KG). We describe the two procedures of the contextual GP bandit problems with NN-AGP, where the acquisition function is replaced by TS or KG. It chooses the action that maximizes the expected reward with respect to a random belief that is drawn for a posterior distribution.

This study focuses on enhancing rice leaf disease image classification algorithms, which have traditionally relied on Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models. We employed transfer learning with MobileViTV2_050 using ImageNet-1k weights, a lightweight model that integrates CNN's local feature extraction with Vision Transformers' global context learning through a separable self-attention mechanism. Our approach resulted in a significant 15.66% improvement in classification accuracy for MobileViTV2_050-A, our first enhanced model trained on the baseline dataset, achieving 93.14%. Furthermore, MobileViTV2_050-B, our second enhanced model trained on a broader rice leaf dataset, demonstrated a 22.12% improvement, reaching 99.6% test accuracy. Additionally, MobileViTV2-A attained an F1-score of 93% across four rice labels and a Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve ranging from 87% to 97%. In terms of resource consumption, our enhanced models reduced the total parameters of the baseline CNN model by up to 92.50%, from 14 million to 1.1 million. These results indicate that MobileViTV2_050 not only improves computational efficiency through its separable self-attention mechanism but also enhances global context learning. Consequently, it offers a lightweight and robust solution suitable for mobile deployment, advancing the interpretability and practicality of models in precision agriculture.

Huge flames can be seen engulfing a closely-built shanty community in the port area of Manila, in drone footage released by the city's disaster management office. Hundreds of residents have been left without homes, after around 1,000 houses were destroyed in the blaze on Sunday, Manila Fire District said. Dozens of fire engines and fire boats were deployed to tackle the blaze, and the Philippine Air Force sent two helicopters which scooped up up water from Manila Bay to help extinguish the fire. Emergency services have reported no casualties so far, and are yet to identify the cause. The incident comes months after 11 people died in residential fire in the Chinatown district of the Philippine capital.

The aggressiveness of prostate cancer, the most common cancer in men worldwide, is primarily assessed based on histopathological data using the Gleason scoring system. While artificial intelligence (AI) has shown promise in accurately predicting Gleason scores, these predictions often lack inherent explainability, potentially leading to distrust in human-machine interactions. To address this issue, we introduce a novel dataset of 1,015 tissue microarray core images, annotated by an international group of 54 pathologists. The annotations provide detailed localized pattern descriptions for Gleason grading in line with international guidelines. Utilizing this dataset, we develop an inherently explainable AI system based on a U-Net architecture that provides predictions leveraging pathologists' terminology. This approach circumvents post-hoc explainability methods while maintaining or exceeding the performance of methods trained directly for Gleason pattern segmentation (Dice score: 0.713 $\pm$ 0.003 trained on explanations vs. 0.691 $\pm$ 0.010 trained on Gleason patterns). By employing soft labels during training, we capture the intrinsic uncertainty in the data, yielding strong results in Gleason pattern segmentation even in the context of high interobserver variability. With the release of this dataset, we aim to encourage further research into segmentation in medical tasks with high levels of subjectivity and to advance the understanding of pathologists' reasoning processes.

Algorithmic bias is a major issue in machine learning models in educational contexts. However, it has not yet been studied thoroughly in Asian learning contexts, and only limited work has considered algorithmic bias based on regional (sub-national) background. As a step towards addressing this gap, this paper examines the population of 5,986 students at a large university in the Philippines, investigating algorithmic bias based on students' regional background. The university used the Canvas learning management system (LMS) in its online courses across a broad range of domains. Over the period of three semesters, we collected 48.7 million log records of the students' activity in Canvas. We used these logs to train binary classification models that predict student grades from the LMS activity. The best-performing model reached AUC of 0.75 and weighted F1-score of 0.79. Subsequently, we examined the data for bias based on students' region. Evaluation using three metrics: AUC, weighted F1-score, and MADD showed consistent results across all demographic groups. Thus, no unfairness was observed against a particular student group in the grade predictions.

Southeast Asia (SEA) is a region rich in linguistic diversity and cultural variety, with over 1,300 indigenous languages and a population of 671 million people. However, prevailing AI models suffer from a significant lack of representation of texts, images, and audio datasets from SEA, compromising the quality of AI models for SEA languages. Evaluating models for SEA languages is challenging due to the scarcity of high-quality datasets, compounded by the dominance of English training data, raising concerns about potential cultural misrepresentation. To address these challenges, we introduce SEACrowd, a collaborative initiative that consolidates a comprehensive resource hub that fills the resource gap by providing standardized corpora in nearly 1,000 SEA languages across three modalities. Through our SEACrowd benchmarks, we assess the quality of AI models on 36 indigenous languages across 13 tasks, offering valuable insights into the current AI landscape in SEA. Furthermore, we propose strategies to facilitate greater AI advancements, maximizing potential utility and resource equity for the future of AI in SEA.

Transformers are the current architecture of choice for NLP, but their attention layers do not scale well to long contexts. Recent works propose to replace attention with linear recurrent layers -- this is the case for state space models, which enjoy efficient training and inference. However, it remains unclear whether these models are competitive with transformers in machine translation (MT). In this paper, we provide a rigorous and comprehensive experimental comparison between transformers and linear recurrent models for MT. Concretely, we experiment with RetNet, Mamba, and hybrid versions of Mamba which incorporate attention mechanisms. Our findings demonstrate that Mamba is highly competitive with transformers on sentence and paragraph-level datasets, where in the latter both models benefit from shifting the training distribution towards longer sequences. Further analysis show that integrating attention into Mamba improves translation quality, robustness to sequence length extrapolation, and the ability to recall named entities.

Neural Machine Translation models are extremely data and compute-hungry. However, not all data points contribute equally to model training and generalization. Data pruning to remove the low-value data points has the benefit of drastically reducing the compute budget without significant drop in model performance. In this paper, we propose a new data pruning technique: Checkpoints Across Time (CAT), that leverages early model training dynamics to identify the most relevant data points for model performance. We benchmark CAT against several data pruning techniques including COMET-QE, LASER and LaBSE. We find that CAT outperforms the benchmarks on Indo-European languages on multiple test sets. When applied to English-German, English-French and English-Swahili translation tasks, CAT achieves comparable performance to using the full dataset, while pruning up to 50% of training data. We inspect the data points that CAT selects and find that it tends to favour longer sentences and sentences with unique or rare words.